The US has published a trove of declassified documents that shed new light on the mindset of Osama bin Laden, the late al-Qaeda leader, before he was killed by US Navy Seals in 2011.

Hunkered down in his Pakistani compound, Bin Laden pleaded with his followers to stay focused on attacking the United States instead of being dragged into Muslim infighting.

“The focus should be on killing and fighting the American people and their representatives,” Bin Laden wrote in one of the documents revealed on Wednesday.

The letter was among thousands of files found by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011 when they descended on Bin Laden’s hideout in the garrison town of Abbottabad and shot him dead.

US intelligence agencies have now declassified more than 100 of these documents taken from Bin Laden’s archive, after politicians ordered the move and critics accused the CIA of withholding material.

The AFP news agency was given exclusive access to the documents ahead of their release.

CIA translations

Jeff Anchukaitis, spokesman for the US Director of National Intelligence’s office, said the release of “a sizeable tranche of documents recovered during the raid” was in keeping with US President Barack Obama’s call for “increased transparency”.

It was also in accordance with a law obliging the spy agencies to review all the Bin Laden materials for possible release, he said.

The documents are Central Intelligence Agency translations of the originals in English, and AFP had no way to independently verify the materials or the accuracy of the translation.

The release came shortly after US journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that Washington’s official account of the hunt for Bin Laden and the raid that led to his death was a lie.

But CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani said the declassification had been long planned and had not been intended as a response to Hersh’s report.

From the strategic and theological discussions to the mundane details of domestic funding and security measures, the documents show Bin Laden once again attacking the West in a spectacular fashion.

He scolded his followers for gathering in large groups and fretted about a microscopic bug being inserted in his wife’s clothes.

He laid out plans to groom a new cadre of leaders willing to risk the dangers of joining al-Qaeda, and his associates discussed arrangements for smuggling Bin Laden’s favourite son and likely heir, Hamza, to Pakistan.

Citing domestic US public opposition to the Vietnam War, Bin Laden argued that the only way to alter US foreign policy was to “start striking America to force it to abandon these rulers and leave the Muslims alone”.

But the documents also highlight deep divisions among his followers over how to wage their campaigns.

Bin Laden warned that conflict with regimes in the Middle East would distract the extremists from hitting hard at what as far as he was concerned was the real enemy – America.

“We should stop operations against the army and the police in all regions, especially Yemen,” he wrote.

The correspondence reflected Bin Laden’s “worry that disunity within the global jihadist movement could spell its demise,” said a senior US intelligence analyst.

The letters also show Bin Laden was stunned by the Arab uprisings that erupted across the region from 2010 and urged his deputies to seize the moment of “revolution” and rally Muslim youth.

ISIL and Bin Laden

Al-Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, which would later morph into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group – and which now increasingly overshadows al-Qaeda – also came up in the documents.

Bin Laden and his then deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, received a scathing rebuke in a letter from some Iraqi supporters, who demanded they denounce the bloodletting in Iraq.

The Jihad and Reform Front warned Bin Laden that God would hold him to account “for blessing the work done by the al-Qaeda in Iraq organisation without disavowing the scandals that are committed in your name”.

“If you still can, then this is your last chance to remedy the jihad breakdown that is about to take place in Iraq, that is mostly caused by your followers,” said the letter dated May 22, 2007.

Bin Laden wrote of the need for large-scale terror operations, even though some of his deputies were finding it difficult to organise massive attacks as they tried to avert drones overhead and US eavesdropping.

One document recently declassified in a terrorism trial in New York but not released on Wednesday quotes Abu Musab al-Suri, an al-Qaeda veteran, who advocated going after smaller targets of opportunity as a more realistic approach, intelligence officials said.

“Bin Laden at the time of his death remained focused on large-scale operations while other al-Qaeda leaders believed smaller operations, or inciting lone terrorist attacks, could succeed at bleeding the West economically,” the intelligence analyst said.

Bin Laden failed to win the argument. After his death, al-Qaeda’s leadership called for lone-wolf attacks, and Suri’s idea of “individual jihad” won out.

ISIL, which was officially excommunicated from al-Qaeda, now controls vast swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria and its online propaganda has been blamed for inspiring attacks from Paris to the Dallas suburbs.

This decision, Hersh argues in the London Review of Books, forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.

“High-level lying nonetheless remains the modus operandi of U.S. policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no,” Hersh wrote of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

Hersh based his report on a single, anonymous source. This individual, he said, is a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad.”

Hersh’s source alleged that the Pakistani government had an active role in approving and implementing the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

In addition, the source said that the Obama administration originally agreed to announce bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike rather than shot during an active Special Forces mission.

“Obama’s speech was put together in a rush,” Hersh wrote of Obama’s announcement of Operation Neptune Spear to Americans.

“This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following,” he added.

“This was not the fog of war,” Hersh quoted his anonymous source as saying.

“The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong – that wasn’t even discussed,” the source added.

“And once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover story on the fly,” the source said of Obama’s advisers’ response to his speech on the raid, Hersh wrote.

Hersh’s report also accuses the Obama administration of embellishing the details of the raid itself and presenting al Qaeda as a bigger threat than it actually was before bin Laden’s death.